html special characters and web forms

[Donald Leslie {74279}]

I have a web application which allows text to be input into a form.

A user went to a web page where the text contained a quote , which was
represented in the page source as &#8217 .

When the form data is read the quote becomes \222 . Where do I find
how this is being encoded so I can put back the quote. or other special 
characters, I found one  reference which said that this was due to UTF-8 
encoding .

This is a problem for me since the text containing the quote is stored 
in a data base. An xml database query breaks when it thinks the record 
contains binary data.

Don Leslie